Process Analytical Instrumentation in Industry

Process Analytical Instrumentation in Industry 233 HOLDING COIL... 

Infrared spectroscopy, in the forms of both NIR and mid-IR spectroscopy, has been hailed as a major growth area for process analytical instruments.4,5 This view assumes that traditional laboratory instruments are outside of those covered by the areas concerned. Overall, this has been difficult to define in terms of the boundaries between the laboratory and the process where they start and end. Some of the confusion arises by the term process analysis itself. In the most liberal form, it can be considered to be any analysis that is made within an industrial environment that qualifies a product. This ranges from the QC of incoming raw materials, to the control of the manufacturing process through its various intermediate stages, and on to the analysis of the product. How this is viewed is very much industry-dependent. 

Accelerated drug development schemes have shifted the need for analytical instrumentation to include criteria for high throughput (quantitative process approaches) and the capability to contribute to an application that produces information for accelerated decision making (qualitative process approaches). The value of sensitivity, selectivity, and detail are still significant however, new parameters dealing with efficiency, productivity, and information content have become the new watermarks for analytical instrumentation in the pharmaceutical industry. These factors have been affected by shorter timelines and the pharmaceutically relevant information required for decision making. 

The methods dependent upon measurement of an electrical property, and those based upon determination of the extent to which radiation is absorbed or upon assessment of the intensity of emitted radiation, all require the use of a suitable instrument, e.g. polarograph, spectrophotometer, etc., and in consequence such methods are referred to as instrumental methods . Instrumental methods are usually much faster than purely chemical procedures, they are normally applicable at concentrations far too small to be amenable to determination by classical methods, and they find wide application in industry. In most cases a microcomputer can be interfaced to the instrument so that absorption curves, polarograms, titration curves, etc., can be plotted automatically, and in fact, by the incorporation of appropriate servo-mechanisms, the whole analytical process may, in suitable cases, be completely automated. 

F. McClellan andB.R. Kowalski, Process Analytical Chemistry, Blackie Academic and Professional, London, 1995. C.H. Gregory, H.B. Appleton, A.P. Lowes and F.C. Whalen, Instrumentation and Control in the German Chemical Industry, British Intelligence Operations Subcommittee Report 1007, June 1946. 

Safety mnst be the first consideration of any process analytical installation. Electrical and weather enclosures and safe instrnment-process interfaces are expected for any process spectroscopy installation. The presence of a powerfnl laser, however, is nniqne to process Raman instruments and mnst be addressed due to its potential to injnre someone. Eye and skin injnries are the most common resnlts of improper laser exposure. Fortunately, being safe also is easy. Becanse so many people have seen pictnres of large industrial cutting lasers in operation, this is often what operations personnel erroneonsly first envision when a laser installation is discnssed. However, modem instmments nse small footprint, comparatively low power lasers, safely isolated in a variety of enclosures and armed with various interlocks to prevent accidental exposnre to the beam. 

M.J. Pelletier, New developments in analytical instruments Raman scattering emission spectrophotometers, in Process/Industrial Instruments and Controls Handbook, G.K. McMillan and D.M. Considine (Eds), McGraw-Hill, New York, 1999. 

Process analytical chemistry generally describes the science and technology associated with displacement of laboratory-based measurements with sensors and instrumentation positioned closer to the site of operation. Although industrial process analyzers have been in use for more than 60 years [3], the modern period of essentially began with the formation of the Center for Process Analytical Chemistry (CPAC) in 1984 [4]. As described by Callis, Illman, and Kowalski [5], the goal of... 

Today, as a direct solid-state analytical technique, dc GDMS is more frequently applied for multi-element determination of trace contaminants, mostly of high purity metallic bulk samples (or of alloys) especially for process control in industrial laboratories. The capability of GDMS in comparison to GD-OES (glow discharge optical emission spectrometry) is demonstrated in a round robin test for trace and ultratrace analysis on pure copper materials.17 All mass spectrometric laboratories in this round robin test used the GDMS VG 9000 as the instrument, but for several... 

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